IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 7

is a sorrowful critique detailing the
impact of "Western" culture, values,
attitudes, and behavior on the one
hand, and economic development
on the other. The third part tries to
reconcile the two competing forces
of tradition and progress: how to
get the best out of both of them,
i.e., leveraging the advantages of
progress (e.g., in health and education) and tradition (e.g., in re-use
and sustainability).
Ostrom's fieldwork, in contrast
to that of Malinowski and NorbergHodge, was much more widely
dis--tributed, both temporally and
geographically. Her primary concern
was common-pool resource (CPR)
management, and its sustainability at scale. A theoretical analysis
using game theory made predictions
that were reproduced in laboratory
experiments, i.e., that without some
form of coercion, a "large" group of
people would act in such a way as to
deplete (exhaust) a shared resource
in the short term, even if that was
in no-one's interest in the long term.
However, this was not the outcome
that was inevitably observed em--
pirically, based on observations of
common-pool resources as diverse
as forests, fisheries, and irrigation,
in countries as diverse as Spain,
Japan, and America, across centuries. Ostrom observed that it was
the mutual agreement of self-governing institutions that specified
constraints on behavior that were
voluntarily observed and enforced;
however, it was not just the institution per se that made the difference:
an institution had to exhibit eight
distinctive features for successful
sustainability of a resource, which
did not occur if one or more were
missing. Ostrom then went one step
further, and recommended that
whenever faced with a CPR problem,
instead of hoping to evolve an institution with the necessary features, it
was preferable to design (or supply)
JUNE 2020

an institution with those features
already present.

Knowledge Regression

he was studying as "savage" or
"primitive," under the assumption that "Western civilization"
was patently more advanced. For
sure, the gift economy of the Kula
ring was based on a different kind
of transaction than a purely moneta r y exchange, and created a
different kind of wealth than financial wealth: it brought social, psychological, and spiritual wealth
instead. But are economic attitudes so much more adva nc ed
that enshrine maximizing shareholder returns (rather than a contribution to the public interest or
common good) as a legal duty of
companies, that promote the pursuit of personal property as the
si ng le wor t hwh i le objective of
human endeavor, and that ingrain
the idea that social status and jobworthiness are not just associated

Apart from their obvious humanity,
what these books have in common
is the documentation of deep social
knowledge. In the case of the Trobriand islanders, it was how a gift
economy, based on the giving of
gifts, the identifying rituals accompanying that giving, and the memories and semantics associated with
the gift, could bind together disparate groups separated sometimes
by hundreds of miles of hazardous
ocean. In the case of the Ladakh,
it was finely-tuned attentiveness to
the local environment and inventiveness in applying the produce
of that environment that enabled
them to survive in harsh conditions.
In the case of CPR management,
it was how communities
could confound the seemingly inexorable logic of
an operational-choice public goods game with metaPolitical denigration of nonlevel politica l games of
collective a nd constitufinancial forms of wealth have
tional choice. Without anything like the mathematical
been accelerated by new
ability or insight of Nash,
technologies.
these communities were
s t i l l a ble t o e sc ap e t he
apparent inevitability of
a Nash equilibrium.
with, but defined by level of personIt might have been thought that
al income?
with 100 years of development, the
Indeed, the political and socioinvention of the Internet, and the
economic denigration of non-finanpartial realization of the potential of
cial forms of wealth have been
Artificial Intelligence, that new appliaccentuated by new technologies
cations would harness this deep
giving rise to Internet-based business
models underpinning the "sharing
social knowledge for the benefit
economy" and the "platform econoof humankind. Rather, the opposite
my." The Olympics (summer and winseems to have happened: it appears
ter) happened only to one city every
that a kind of knowledge regression
four years (an unaccountable invahas occurred instead.
sive ultra-national force displaces
From a 21st century perspecpeople, despoils an environment and
tive, it is somewhat unfortunate
enriches itself through real estate
that much of Malinowski's language
deals, favorable tax arrangements
made reference to the culture that
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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